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Itsy Bitsy Exercises
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Four-week Bitsy workshop Sep 28 - Oct 18
August 25, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
15
I'm excited to announce I'll be leading a four-week workshop on crafting interactive fiction with Bitsy starting September 27! It'll be fully remote, so anyone can sign up. In these four weekly meetin...
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It's the same thing every night.
July 19, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
11
In the previous post I mentioned that my class ends with a Comedy project and an Intimacy project, both designed to be challenges for students. There are two things that are very hard to do in game de...
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Cave of the Ancient Treasure
July 18, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
6
The class ends with two major projects, both designed to challenge students: one about comedy, and the other about intimacy. This is an exercise I use to introduce the former. There's an elder in a ca...
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Nearly the Big Day Now
July 17, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
10
Today: A simple exercise in writing subtextually. A room in a house, two figures, a somber color palette, a calendar on the wall. Something is about to happen. Your task: Something significant is goin...
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Just Your Classic Whodunnit
July 16, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
7
The premise: A classic locked-room murder mystery. There's a body in the study. The deceased's friends – the suspects – mill about nervously in the foyer. But they have no way to tell the detectiv...
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The Day of the Robbery
July 15, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
6
This one isn't an exercise per se, but I wanted to show it off anyway. It's a kind of companion to the Rambling Old Man , an example I cooked up for use in explaining a few principals in games writing...
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Rambling Old Man
July 14, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
3
This old man is way too verbose! Maybe in a game with larger text boxes it would feel less overwhelming, but crammed into Bitsy's small text box it feels like a painfully slow, long interaction. Plus,...
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Where's My Key?
July 13, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
4
Most frequently in Bitsy games, we see the player avatar represent an entire single character who moves through a world that is seen from a bird's eye perspective. The avatar, though, can be a lot of...
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Just Another Monday
July 12, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
4
Here's an exercise in time travel. Specifically, it's about how we use rooms and exits in Bitsy to represent not just movement in space, but movement in time as well. The task: Here's a scene on a tra...
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Lunch Date at the Witch's House
July 11, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
7
What do witches serve for lunch, anyway? You're going to find out – assuming you can find the witch's house! In this exercise, the player needs to enter the house belonging to the witch, but unfortu...
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Stock City
July 10, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
8
Today's exercise doesn't have its own Bitsy file – it's all about taking an image and translating it into a modular tileset. I typically run this exercise with the attached image – Small Town Main...
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Shrine of the Sword
July 09, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
7
The player approaches the sword only to discover it's a fake – the real one is hidden in the hollow of the tree in back of the shrine. (A hidden dialogue trigger will activate when the player goes u...
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The Museum of 1980s Artifacts
July 08, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
12
A very simple exercise in writing with voice – meaning how characters communicate their values and worldview via their dialogue and narration. The Museum of 1980s Artifacts is a single room with fou...
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The Wizard's Tower
July 07, 2025
by
Anna Anthropy
11
We're kicking things off with not-quite-an-exercise - this is more of an early project to get students acquainted with the features of the Bitsy editor. What's in the file? The first room of what will...
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